The story of war and the refugees it provokes is a story as old as homo sapiens. But few are as complicated, confusing and enduring as the story of how more than 100,000 Polish soldiers ended up fighting as part of the British Eighth Army in Italy in 1944-45 , including on the Gothic Line. The saga began when Hitler invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939 which triggered the start of WWII. The Soviet Union followed up with a Polish invasion two weeks later after the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union went into force. The dual invasions scattered hundreds of thousands of Polish refugees throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and other parts of the world. The heroic sacrifice to get to Italy and then again onto the battlefield climaxed in April 1945 when the second Polish Army Corp liberated Bologna in the final days of the Gothic Line Offensive and WWII in Italy. However there were no spoils of victory for the Polish Army in Italy thanks to the February 1945 Yalta Conference when British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt ceded Eastern Europe control to the Soviet Union and its murderous dictator Josef Stalin.

Michel Zarychita, an historian with the Polish Institute for National Remembrance in Warsaw provides the details of the complex Polish soldier diaspora triggered by WW II and how they ended up in Italy in this 2-part series about Poland and their contribution in Italy and the Gothic Line.

The second episode of this two-part series focuses on the story of the Jewish father of prominent Italian journalist Enrico Singer. Leone Singer escaped to Italy in 1938 from central Europe and the Nazis and then again from the Italian Fascists and joined the Polish Second Army Corp in Ancona on the Adriatic Coast of Italy as they were launching their part of the Gothic Line Offensive.

Photo of Polish General Wladyslaw Anders courtesy of Polish Institute for National Remembrance photographic archives.

War and politics can make for strange bedfellows and that axiom was as true 80 years ago in WW II in Italy as it is today. One prominent example of that was Brazil joining the Allied Forces to end Nazi and Italian Fascist tyranny in Italy on the Gothic Line Offensive. Before and during WW II, Brazil was led by dictator Getulio Vargas who took power in Brazil via a coup d'etat in the 1930s. His authoritarian inspiration came from none other than Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. However after U.S. State Department lobbying that followed the Japanese Pearl Harbor attack in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941 and the subsequent sinking of Brazilian coastal merchant ships by German submarines, Brazil declared war in 1942 on the Axis Forces of Germany, Italy and Japan.

To help the Allied Forces, the Brazilian army formed a 25,000 soldier Brazilian Expeditionary Force (FEB). Unlike any other WWII army, the FEB was racially integrated - an example that would go on to help galvanize the U.S. African American civil rights movement.

However American military commanders were not impressed. The Brazilian military training and weaponry was based on WW I military doctrine and was therefore outdated and obsolete, especially as it concerned mountain warfare .

It was only when the U.S. Army Allied Command decided to move more than 25,000 U.S. troops out of Italy in mid-1944 to support the Normandy invasion in France and were desperately in need of replacements for the Gothic Line Offensive that the Brazilian FEB was deployed. That took place in the second half of 1944 in Tuscany. After their first combat training in WW II mobile and mountain warfare, the FEB was sent to the Apennine Mountains. Flanking them on their left was the segregated U.S. African-American 92nd Division ``Buffalo Soldiers'', who were also facing their first WWII combat. . The FEB's role was to work primarily with the U.S. Army 10th Mountain Division, which was also experiencing its first combat after more than two years of intensive mountain combat training in the United States.

The FEB suffered significant losses in its first combat when it was tasked with driving German troops off key strategic mountains that were blocking the U.S. Fifth Army from a breakthrough in its goal to reach Bologna before Christmas of 1944. Tactical errors were partly to blame for initial FEB failures. But strategically placed mountain-top German artillery also made their task difficult if not impossible.

By the spring of 1945, the FEB was, by all accounts, a much more effective fighting force and achieved major victories. One of those included the conquest of the mountain town of Montese west of Bologna where the FEB are feted annually.

Two authors - Brazilian Prof. Dennison de Oliveira and Italian museum curator Andrea Gondolfin - who have chronicled the story of the FEB in recent years - will provide in this podcast episode further insight to the Brazilian WWII story on the Gothic Line in Italy.

During the final segment of the episode we will fast forward 80 years when neo-fascism and war are threatening the European continent in eerily similar ways to what happened in the run-up up to WW II. As was the case in the 1930s, Brazil and its current Socialist President Lula da Silva has some ironical bedfellows. No. 1 on that list is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who President Lula da Silva has embraced and is indirectly supporting by buying diesel fuel from Russia even though Brazil has sufficient domestic supplies. President Lula has repeatedly rebuffed Western democratic country pleas, including from many that Brazil allied with in WW II, to join the effort to help Ukraine. Vitelio Brustolin, an international relations professor in Brazil and in the United States, will explain how by embracing Putin Lula is out of step with most Brazilians.

For more information about the podcast contact Joe Kirwin at joekirwin@compuserve.com or at 00 32 478 277802.

Ivy League envy is a familiar theme that has occasionally surfaced in American public and political life since the elite universities such as Harvard, Cornell, Dartmouth, Yale and others opened more than 200 years ago. The current resentment wave led by U.S. President Donald Trump and his MAGA mob is a particularly pernicious, unwarranted inquisition and will surely backfire - just as happened in the past, including in World War II.

Moreover when U.S. Army General Mark Clark planned and commanded the 1943-44 winter American assault on the mountainous terrain of mainland Italy between Naples and Rome, he had at his disposal the first-ever specially trained mountain division of more than 20,000 soldiers. Known as the 10th Mountain Division, the troops had undergone rigorous training since 1941 - first on Mount Rainier in Washington state and then high in the Colorado mountains at a purpose-built training base where they honed their combat skills in frigid weather using skis and mountain climbing. But after more than two years of training - and despite a desperate need for infantry troops - the Tenth Mountain Division was rejected by Clark. Why? Because he considered them unreliable Ivy League ``elitists'' unsuitable for rugged combat. Indeed a large majority of the 10th Mountain Division were from Ivy League institutions, especially schools such as Dartmouth and others located in the New England mountains.

Clark's initial rejection of the 10th Mountain Division proved costly as the U.S. military struggled in the mountains between Naples and Rome . As it was, specially trained French and Moroccan mountain troops were employed when U.S. commanders withdrew some American troops to conduct the amphibious, Anzio surprise beach landing 30 miles southwest of Rome in early 1944. The French and Moroccan troops were fierce fighters but they also sexually assaulted thousands of Italian women - a controversy that still lingers today and is a shameful legacy that some Italians use to either ignore or tarnish the sacrifices of Allied Forces in Italy . As it was, the winter of 1943-44 was a bloody battle that cost the lives of tens of thouands of Allied soldiers, many of whom had never trained or fought in the mountains.

Despite that costly campaign, Clark continued to reject the 10th Mountain Division when he planned the U.S. Fifth Army assault on the Gothic Line, which began in early September of 1944. Again faced with the deadly challenge of assaulting German mountain-top fortifications in the northern Apennine mountains, Clark insisted on using U.S. army infantry divisions that had been on the front lines for nearly two years with minimal or no rest - unheard of in contemporary military doctrine. Military historians cite low morale and high deserationrates among those troops that Clark deployed with the launch of the U.S. Fifth Army's assault up the center of the Apennines between Florence and Bologna.

Finally Clark and other U.S. commanders, facing failure as the Gothic Line offensive stalled, relented and in December 1944 the 10th Mountain Division infantry arrived in Tuscany in the western part of the Apennines. They would go on to play a decisive role in breaking through German mountain-top artillery that had earlier slaughtered hundreds of American and Brazilian troops trying to break through the Gothic Line.

Ultimately, the 10th Mountain Division would not only break through the Gothic Line at a pace much faster than expected but would arrive in the Po Valley and then at the foot of the Alps when WW II in Europe ended in May 1945. They had achieved every objective assigned to them but at a cost. Of the approximately 20,000 10th Mountain Division soldiers that arrived on the front lines in Italy in December more than 1,000 soldiers were killed and approximately 3,900 were injured in six months.